Oracle Blog

Blog for sprack

Improved crypto scaling on T2+

Some great work by Krishan
Yenduri has led to nice improvements in the multi-socket bulk
cipher performance on UltraSPARC T2+ processors. The improvements are
available in the current build, snv_117. Krishna has performance data
for scaling on a 4-socket T5440 system in his recent blog.
Using the same kernel umicrobenchmark, the following plot shows the
scaling on a dual-socket UltraSPARC T2 Plus system:

In this test, the requesting threads are scheduled by Solaris
(rather than bound to specific cores), so Solaris will tend to even
distribute the threads across the 16 cores in the system – this
explains by you get this rapid increase in aggregate cryptographic
throughout as the number of threads is increased. If the first
8-threads where bound to core 0, the second 8 to core 1 and so on,
the scaling would be essentially linear as the cores are added.

So, a 2-socket T2+ system is delivering around 9GBytes/second. Not
bad, given most other dual-socket systems can deliver at max around
2GB/s. Further, from the above it is apparent that we hit 9GB/s on
the T2 system with less than 50% of the HW strands being utilized.

About

Dr. Spracklen is a senior staff engineer in the Architecture Technology Group (Sun Microelectronics), that is focused on architecting and modeling next-generation SPARC processors. His current focus is hardware accelerators.